Morning Must Reads: March 3

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the U.S. and his vocal criticism of President Barack Obama’s policies, especially his approach to Iran, have highlighted the deep ideological gulf between the two leaders

Tuesday marks the 10th anniversary of National Pancake Day, an annual event in which IHOP customers get free pancakes and millions of dollars are raised for charity. The magic combo easily makes Pancake Day one of the most beloved fake holidays of the year

The first issue lacked the distinctive red border for which the magazine has come to be known. The cover subject was the now obscure Joseph G. Cannon, and the whole thing was only 32 pages long. Flip through the pages as TIME turns 92

The commander of the Vatican’s security forces acknowledged the existence of a real threat to the Pope from ISIS, but said there is no indication of a planned attack on the Catholic leader. “The threat exists,” Domenico Giani said

Drinking three to five cups of coffee per day may help to reduce signs of blocked arteries, says a new study out of South Korea. The findings, published Monday in the medical journal Heart, add to the discussion about whether or not coffee is good for cardiovascular health

Warner Bros. is said to be finalizing a deal to bring It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War to the big screen, with Steven Spielberg attached as director and Jennifer Lawrence in a starring role. The memoir by Lynsey Addario has barely been out a month

Hundreds of thousands of people in the E.U. will suffer premature death in the next two decades because of toxic air, a report says. The European Environment Agency says in 2011 alone, over 400,000 Europeans died from pollution

Fears are growing for a Canadian pastor who has not been heard from since Jan. 31 when he was invited by North Korean officials to Pyongyang, according to a South Korean activist. The Reverend Hyeon Soo Lim is considered a highly influential Christian missionary

Tinder launched its much anticipated premium service on Monday, but the popular dating app will cost twice as much for people over 30. Users in the U.S. can purchase the new upgrade for $9.99 a month, unless you’re over 30, in which case you’ll have to pay $19.99

The NBA announced on Monday that it has suspended Houston Rockets guard James Harden for one game without pay for kicking Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James in the groin during Sunday’s game. Harden said the kick was unintentional

Canadian Pastor Feared Detained in North Korea

Reverend Hyeon Soo Lim had previously traveled to North Korea on many occasions without incident

Fears are growing for a Canadian pastor currently in North Korea who has not been heard from since Jan. 31 when he was invited by officials to the capital Pyongyang, according to a well-known South Korean activist.

Reverend Hyeon Soo Lim, of the Light Korean Presbyterian Church in Toronto, has been to North Korea “hundreds of times,” a fellow church member in Canada said, but has never been out of communication for this long before, the AFP reports.

Initially, friends thought the 60-year-old’s lack of communication was due to the 21-day quarantine imposed on foreign visitors due to the Ebola virus, but that time period has now expired.

“As far as I know, he was asked by officials to come to Pyongyang on Jan. 31 before he went incommunicado,” Reverend Chun Ki-Won, a personal acquaintance of Hyeon’s, told AFP.

It is now feared that his disappearance is connected to some of the food-related humanitarian efforts he was involved in, as these projects had been tied to associates of Jang Song-Thaek, national leader Kim Jong Un’s late uncle, who was arrested and executed in 2012.

Religious freedom is severely restricted in North Korea, and foreign missionaries are often treated with strong suspicion. A few have been allowed in to help humanitarian efforts, but those caught proselytizing or participating in unauthorized activities are immediately arrested.

Ex-Principal at Prestigious Australian School ‘Sorry’ for Alleged Sex Abuse

Former students at Knox Grammar include Hollywood star Hugh Jackman and ex-Australian PM Gough Whitlam

The former, longtime principal of one of Australia’s most elite private schools has expressed regret for the alleged sexual abuse that occurred during his tenure.

Ian Paterson apologized Tuesday during a Royal Commission hearing that is investigating institutional responses to sex abuse at Knox Grammar in Sydney, reports the Agence France-Presse.

The ongoing abuse allegedly occurred between the 1970s and 2012, and Paterson served as principal for three decades up until 1998. One former student describes Knox Grammar during these years as having harbored “a large pedophile cohort.”

“I should have known and I should have stopped the events that led to the abuse and its tragic consequences for these boys in my care and their families,” Paterson said.

“My abject failure to provide for you a safe and secure place at Knox strikes at the very heart of a responsibility of a headmaster.”

Although Paterson has not been charged with abuse personally, the commission did hear evidence that in 1989 he inappropriately touched a female student during rehearsals for a stage show with another school.

Paterson is due to give evidence to the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse about how he managed the teachers accused of abusing students. The body was formed in April 2013 to probe accusations of sexual misconduct in state institutions including schools, orphanages and places of worship, and was extended in September 2014 to deal with the thousands of victims who have come forward.

The man who once said Republicans should “lose the primary to win the general election” is nonetheless aiming to establish his credentials in a way that minimizes the ideological protest against his candidacy from the right. But the fight is far from over

Mission: Impossible Star Martin Landau Remembers Leonard Nimoy

Recalls his friendship with the late actor, who replaced him on the 1960s show. Nimoy died Friday, aged 83.

+ READ ARTICLE

Leonard Nimoy was a mensch! Mensch is a word which in Yiddish means “a particularly good person” with the qualities one would hope for in a dear friend or trusted colleague. I met Lenny, as I called him, when I arrived in Hollywood for the first time in the late 1950s with Paddy Chayefsky’s first Broadway play, Middle of the Night.

Lenny was from the Boston area, and I was from New York. Easterners! We could have played brothers as we were virtually the same age and height, both slim of build with similar features in a lean face, a shock of straight black hair, and the two of us had been raised in households by hardworking Jewish parents.

Even though that first meeting was cordial, both of us realized that we could play the same roles, and we would clearly be competitors for those roles. That did happen.

As the years passed and as our careers took different turns, we remained friends and always delighted in our individual success. Our respect for each other grew. Last Friday when I heard of Lenny’s passing, I was devastated. It’s impossible to think of a future without my dear friend and foremost competitor. I will miss him, always. Rest in peace, dear friend!

Chekov Remembers Spock: Walter Koenig on Leonard Nimoy

The actor who played the U.S.S. Enterprise's navigator pays tribute to his late co-star, who died Friday

+ READ ARTICLE

The eulogies for Leonard will be affirmative, loving and respectful. That’s what people confirm after the passing of others, whether or not they draw an accurate picture. It is my honor to say that in this case it’s true; Leonard Nimoy was all those things.

He had great professionalism as an actor. On the set he was consistently the character he played. In fact, I got to know Mr. Spock long before I knew the actor who played him. It was a mark of his integrity that he was so loyal to the role he portrayed. When I finally did get to know the man better, I discovered his compassion, his intelligence and his humanity. All of which laid the foundation for his keen sense of philanthropy.

I was struck by his integrity and his desire to be honest and straightforward in all he did. We were never close friends, but I never stopped believing that if I ever had need for such a friend he would be there.

#AskTIME Subscriber Q and A: David Von Drehle

Welcome to TIME’s subscriber Q&A with editor-at-large for TIME, David Von Drehle, who wrote this week’s cover story, The ISIS Trap. He is the author of four books, including Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year and Triangle: the Fire That Changed America. His other stories can be found here.

You need to be a TIME subscriber to read the Q & A. ($30 a year or 8 cents a day for the magazine and all digital content.) Once you’re signed up, you can log in to the site with a username and password.

flfoghorn asks, David, why does there seem to be a disconnect between journalists and “pundits”? Journalists get severely punished when they err while pundits say what they want whether it’s true or not and get off unscathed. Why would anybody want to be a serious journalist anymore?

Hi, and thank you all for reading TIME and Time.com. It’s an honor to write for you and I’m glad to take your questions. Here’s my advice for a happier life: Stop watching 24-hour cable “news.” You know, most people don’t watch it. At any given moment, roughly 99 percent of Americans aren’t watching cable news. So they aren’t listening to hours of analysis from the pundits who, as you point out, don’t necessarily know what they are talking about. If you must watch, then I suggest one simple rule: the more you see a person on TV, the less you should pay attention. Almost nothing newsworthy ever happens inside a television studio. So people who spend all their time in studios probably don’t know much about the news. As for being a serious journalist—I am lucky enough to know a lot of them, and they are some of the most interesting people I know. It can be very hard work, especially the part about keeping an open mind. But for the right person it is a dream job and always will be.

deconstructive asks, David, thanks for your previous books, especially Triangle. As an architect (albeit an unemployed one, but I digress), I tend to study human disasters like fires, etc. where business greed is enabled by design flaws to create tragedy – like Triangle, Iroquois Theater, Titanic, Coconut Grove, Hamlet chicken factory fire, Beverly Hills Supper Club, etc. (Hint – means of egress, people!) While safety laws are now in place, alas, lax enforcement can still create problems, but at least we now have rules that did not always exist back in Triangle’s day.

But today, while fire is not the greatest threat to worker safety, what do YOU think is, especially to the poorest workers at the bottom of the social ladder – like similar to the poor young women at Triangle? Also note that economic harm is still a threat to the bottom workers thanks to decades of low wages, though some states’s rising minimum wages and most recent moves by employers like Walmart and TJ Maxx – however reluctantly – may help turn the tide. But what other threats are still out there and not adequately addressed? Thanks.

Thank you so much! March 25 will mark the 104th anniversary of the Triangle Fire, and I agree with you completely as to the legacy of that horrible event. American workplaces are much safer than they were a century ago—and where they are unsafe, we have laws in place and we can address the problem through enforcement. I hope that the same will soon be true of factories in the developing world, where working conditions often resemble ours of the bad old days.

To me, the greatest danger facing today’s workers is retirement savings. Life expectancy is longer. Health care is more expensive. But the idea of working a full career for one employer and retiring with a defined pension is slipping into the past. I would love to see more creative thinking around the problem of how we can continue to grow the economy while enabling working-class and middle-class Americans to save more money.

PaulDirks asks, It is a well documented peculiarity of human beings that they are absolutely terrible at evaluating risk. Certainly the massive Ebola outbreak in America taught us as much. It seems to me that ISIS snuff videos are relying on the same phenomenon. Do you, as a journalist, consider it one of your responsibilities to tamp down on panic when it manifests itself or is it more important that your competitors are fanning the flames, so it’s in your interest to ‘follow the trends’ wherever they may lead?

I think one of our most important jobs is to help TIME’s readers make sense of the world and understand what are the real threats and opportunities. I and my colleagues certainly tried to do that during the Ebola epidemic. In that case we tried to focus on the danger faced by West Africans, the unsettling failure of established public health agencies like the World Health Organization, and the importance of a competent response in our globalized world. We’re trying to do the same now with the ISIS problem, where the immediate danger is not to American cities, but to the future of the Middle East.

deconstructiva asks, David, thanks to you and Alex Altman for covering the Ferguson protests. Alas, that area has not been significantly rebuilt and redeveloped – and as other St. Louis journalists like Sarah Kendzior has noted, nor have many other declining areas of the St. Louis area – so do you see an eventual repeat of more government problems, police injustice, and thus more protests – either in Ferguson or nearby St. Louis areas with same problems? Or as we saw in NYC and elsewhere, will other cities also “face their turn” of social unrest as social injustice remain unresolved? Or just go back into a hibernating mode and let problems simmer until the cycle repeat? Given government inaction thanks to GOP obstruction at national and state levels, I don’t see problems being solved on a mass scale for a long time.

I appreciate the shout-out for Alex, who did a wonderful job of reporting from Ferguson. To my first questioner: there’s a fine, young, and serious journalist for you.

I hate covering riots, and you have put your finger on the reason why. They are so destructive of the very neighborhoods and communities where they erupt. Over a lot of years as a reporter, I’ve covered riots from Miami to Los Angeles, from Brooklyn to St. Louis. And I have yet to see a community that wasn’t worse off when it was over. Businesses don’t want to locate to a riot zone. Families don’t want to move to one.

You earlier mentioned my book about the Triangle Fire. A main point of that book was that disciplined, patient political organizing can produce lasting change. You could tell the same story by writing about the Civil Rights struggle, or Mandela, or William Wilberforce and abolition—any of a huge number of reform movements. Riots are negative, even nihilistic events. Positive change comes from positive action.

MrObvious asks, Have any reporter ever reminded a politician that passing legislation that forbids Sharia Law or promotes Christianity that it’s a waste of time since it’s illegal according to the constitution?

Well, we try. Sometimes, in my experience, we find that grandstanding politicians are not really interested in the fine points of Constitutional law.

deconstructiva asks, David, thanks for your earlier book on Lincoln. Now, naturally using that as a lead-in to today’s politics, we know that today’s Republican party is not the same as the party that Lincoln led back in his day. Simply put, what happened along the way? We know that for a long time the GOP has been in bed with corporate interests, has long had racist overtones with the Southern Strategy, and now has teavangelical interests embedded as Establishment old-school GOP members infight with the Tea Party. This wasn’t what Lincoln had in mind, no? So what do you think went wrong? Thanks.

Thank you for reading Rise to Greatness. You are right that the Republican Party, like the Democrats, have been through a lot of shifting coalitions over the past 150 years. Lincoln surely would have been surprised to know that his party would one day become the dominant party among white voters in the former Confederacy. But he was never one to say no to any votes.

What was most important to Lincoln was that the United States live up to its promise to be a place where every human being has an opportunity to make his or her own destiny. Born into poverty and denied an education, Lincoln understood that for most of human history, his beginnings would have been his fate—a life sentence in the prison of poverty and ignorance. The United States was a new creation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He also knew that political liberty is rooted in economic liberty—the right, as he put it, to eat the bread that comes from the sweat of one’s own brow. To the extent that either party today is dedicated to those principles of economic liberty and political equality, Lincoln would approve.

Mantisdragon asks, Why does the GOP House hate America and want to see it attacked?

WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders are refusing to support legislation that funds the Department of Homeland Security without imposing immigration policy restrictions, a sign that the department is headed for a partial shutdown Friday night. The legislation is all but guaranteed to pass the Senate. But in the House, it’s a very different story.

I wish everyone in Washington would swear off the habit of playing Russian roulette with funding bills. And also the habit of exaggerating their criticism of their opponents.

Yogi asks, If the Kurds continue performing the leading role of military, police, and governing force in northern Iraq, including their lead in ground troops in the offensive in Mosul, do they finally have the power to initiate independence? Will the US ever change their stance and allow Kurdish independence?

This is a great question. It has been pretty obvious for quite a few years—at least to me—that an independent Kurdistan would very quickly emerge as one of the best-governed states in the region. However, the idea is anathema to Turkey, and Turkey is an increasingly critical piece of the geopolitical puzzle. I think presidents from both parties are likely to move with extreme caution in doing anything to endanger the stability of Turkey.

sacredh asks, Do you think that the GOP candidates will damage each other enough in the primaries that Hillary will have a relatively easy time of it or do you think that this might be a close election?

I think we are a pretty evenly divided country, with the GOP enjoying a slight edge in the down-ballot races and the Democrats having a head start in presidential races. So I will always bet on a fairly close race. That said, if Senator Clinton could create a wave around the idea of electing the first woman president, I think it could be quite powerful in an electorate where women voters outnumber men.

deconstructive asks,David, after watching ISIS tragedies and then stepping back and looking at broader picture of Middle Eastern fighting over time, I wonder how much ties in with the fundamental split between Sunnis and Shia fighting over the ages (as opposed to simple foreign invasions). Do you think their split will remain practically forever? While their permanent split into two different Islamic religions may seem unlikely, it did happen to the Christian faith thanks to Martin Luther. Of course, when Protestantism was born, wars literally broke out all over Europe. Now today, Protestants and Catholics are no longer fighting with bullets (except for past events like Northern Ireland, and that ended too). Might we see Sunnis and Shia finally stop fighting too, either through peaceful resolution or just going their separate ways as two religions, or other means? Or is that region doomed to indefinite pain?

I have been surprised and saddened to see how deep and violent the division is between Sunnis and Shia. Even worse, though, is the deeply cynical abuse of those divisions that many Middle East rulers employ to hold power. Divide and conquer is the first rule of government in far too many regional capitals. If we could somehow begin to see a more enlightened and positive brand of government take root there, maybe the religious strife could be cooled. But it is certainly boiling now, alas.

Morning Must Reads: February 27

The militant group is more than a network of terrorist cells: it’s almost a nation. It collects taxes and delivers government services while slaughtering prisoners and demanding ransoms. Here are 12 dispatches from around the world on the rising global threat

The Internet officially broke on Thursday night, thanks to a dress that defies the classification of color. Is it white and gold or is it black and blue? Well, that depends on the light and the physiology of the individual eye, according to experts.

The U.S. military is currently enjoying its longest stretch without a combat death since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Wednesday marked the 75th day since American forces suffered its last fatality, when two soldiers were killed in Afghanistan’s Parwan province

The Beck apology came after he kind of stole the artist’s thunder at the 2015 Grammy Awards, nearly “pulling a Kanye”—or his “I’mma let you finish” moment with Swift at the VMAs in 2009—when Beck won Album of the Year over Béyonce.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has said the Apple Watch will hit stores in April, and a just-announced March 9 event looks like the perfect time to unveil new details about the device. The event could also involve other announcements, like a refreshed MacBook Air or Apple TV

The Commander-in-Chief said he wished he could “upvote” every one of the Reddit users who commented on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s net neutrality rules. The federal agency approved regulations to keep the internet an open marketplace.

Harrison Ford will once again grace the silver screen as Rick Deckard in the upcoming sequel to Blade Runner, Alcon Entertainment announced on Thursday. Ridley Scott, the original director of the 1982 sci-fi thriller, will not be coming back to direct the latest version

Earl Lloyd, the first black professional NBA player, passed away Thursday at the age of 86. Known as “the Big Cat,” the forward made his league debut in October 1950, playing for the Washington Capitals. Lloyd averaged 8.4 points during 560 regular-season NBA games

Virginia will now compensate victims of the eugenics program. Advocates for surviving victims won a three-year fight on Thursday when the Virginia General Assembly budgeted $400,000 to compensate them at the rate of $25,000 each

We will hold an #AskTIME subscriber Q&A today, Friday, February 27, at 1 p.m., with editor-at-large for TIME, David Von Drehle, who wrote this week’s cover story, The ISIS Trap. He is the author of four books, including Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year and Triangle: the Fire That Changed America. His other stories can be found here.

You can submit your questions beforehand on Twitter using the #AskTIME hashtag or in the comments of this post. We depend on smart, interesting questions from readers.

You will need to be a TIME subscriber to read the Q & A. ($30 a year or 8 cents a day for the magazine and all digital content.) Once you’re signed up, you can log in to the site with a username and password.

Morning Must Reads: February 25

President Barack Obama’s top national security aide lambasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s plan to address Congress as “destructive [to] the fabric of the relationship” between the two countries, as political fallout continued to mount

A Texas jury found former Marine Eddie Ray Routh guilty in the murder of Chris Kyle and his friend Chad Littlefield. Routh was sentenced to life in prison, in a case that attracted national attention amid the blockbuster, Oscar-nominated film adaptation of Kyle’s book

Mayor Rahm Emanuel could face an even stiffer challenge in April against a runoff opponent aiming to consolidate the support of residents unhappy with how the former White House chief of staff has managed the nation’s third-largest city

Inspired by Patricia Arquette’s Oscars speech about the gender pay gap in Hollywood, prominent female wrestler A.J. Lee has spoken out against alleged inequality in the WWE. Womne “receive a fraction of the wages & screen time” as men, she said

Reprints of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography will be hitting bookstores across Germany once more — the first time since the Nazi leader’s death. The new edition will be a heavily annotated 2,000-page volume that features criticism and analysis

British actor Ben Hardy has reportedly landed a key role in Bryan Singer’s upcoming movieX-Men: Apocalypse. Hardy’s part in the comic-book film sequel hasn’t yet been disclosed but reports suggest it will be “important”

Contrary to its reputation as a toker’s paradise, Jamaica has long banned possession of marijuana. But a law enacted Tuesday decriminalized possession of small amounts, while also laying the groundwork for regulating its cultivation and medical usage

Arizona’s workplace-safety agency has issued several recommendations that it says could help prevent accidental shootings like the one at a northwestern Arizona shooting range last year involving a 9-year-old girl using an Uzi

The Chicago Bulls announced on Tuesday that Derrick Rose will undergo surgery to address a medial meniscus tear, marking the third time he’s undergone knee surgery since May 2012. Rose reported feeling pain in his right knee, which led to an exam and an MRI